Brands getting social … Chobani gets the first Olympics brand Gold

July 25, 2012

There are many ways to measure a brand’s social impact during the Olympics, and all of them show a different story. A new follower or fan from a user is valuable, but the easiest (and therefore most prolific) way for a user to engage with brand content is to quickly share or search on one of the more than 300 social services on the web.

Here at AddThis, we are focused on all types of sharing because when you look at shares from more than 1.3 billion people, you get a representative view of what people care about.

In order to get this wide view of social activity, AddThis is tracking the 10 sponsors of the US Olympic team on our daily Scorecard to show who is winning the race for social engagement on the open web. We are assigning brand medal winners by a clear metric – the percent increase of mentions (shares and searches) across the 14 million sites that use the AddThis social network. AddThis is focused on mentions because we see more than 250 million users in the US and we touch the average user 140 times. Great scale gives the clearest view of US (and global) sentiment.

The first winner of the brand gold medal in the run-up to the Games is Chobani, which had its first TV campaigns in the US only 16 months ago. Chobani launched their Chobani Champions product focused on kids this summer with Jenny Finch, an Olympic softball player, and a theme of “Win the day.” Chobani not only leads with mentions but also with write-ups, showing that there is new interest in the brand coming up to the Olympics.

Although the medal is on mentions, the AddThis brand scorecard measures 3 levels of social interaction to look at the full funnel of consumer engagement:

Mentions – Users sharing and searching on brand content. The ultimate measure of user engagement across the web, “mentions” is the % increase of all the shares and searches that include the name of the brand across the 300+ social services on the open web – from Pinterest and Facebook to Odnoklassniki in Russia.

Writeups – Content creators writing on a given brand. “Writeups” is the % increase of the number of domains that have written a piece of content on a given brand. Writeups is a good measure of the success of buzz and the outreach that brands have done to press and bloggers in advance of the Games, resulting in being mentioned in more articles (for sponsoring athletes for example).

Followers – Users becoming brand advocates. “Followers” is the number of new Twitter followers, a publicly available measure of how successful a campaign has been in creating advocates.

Check back here on the blog for daily Olympics updates and wrap-ups. We’ll also be live tweeting interesting stats during some of the most popular events so be sure to follow us on Twitter.